Customer Reviews

ABC News 20/20 Billy Joel

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This 20/20 interview from 1980 was apparently Billy Joel's first national TV interview. The original interview was about 20 minutes long and was very well done (the interviewer, Tom Hovath, is a former director of the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art, and did a very good job). But this DVD is a heavily-edited version, that runs only about 9 minutes. It cuts more than half of the original interview. I first thought this might have been due to music licensing issues, however, there are several portions of the interview that were cut that had no music at all, such as the interviews with patrons of The Executive Club, the bar where Billy played as "Bill Martin" for several months in the early 1970s. It is very misleading for this DVD to be sold without a warning or notation that most of the original interview has been cut entirely. The video quality is also poor, it would regularly "shake" as if recorded from an old VCR to a new DVD (perhaps that is what happened). Is it worth $14.95? No, unless you are a Billy Joel fanatic/completist and need to have everything about Billy Joel, but if you are, you've probably found other means to view the original interview.